All the coverage you’ll see from Saturday night’s ABC News/Des Moines Register debate – the TV shots, the photographs – happened in Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium, but all the coverage you’ll read happened across campus at the Knapp Center.

A sold-out Sheslow hosted the debating candidates and a crowd of 680 people, leaving no room for press. So as is the norm at presidential debates, journalists watched a feed of the event from another location.

Normally the home of Drake basketball, the Knapp Center on Saturday night became a filing center filled with some 500 print and online journalists. They ate free sandwiches, enjoyed a popcorn bar and watched a feed of the debate on two giant projector screens.

Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, led six staffers and two dozen Drake student volunteers in preparing Knapp for its media invasion. It took two days.

Sure, they set up rows and rows of tables and chairs but Schneider and his team also prepped the building’s infrastructure for the hundreds of laptops and smart phones arriving that night.

“We come in and we boost the cell phone signal way up and we set up all kinds of WiFi access so that there’s no problem for anybody who needs to file,” he said. “We literally hire somebody to bring a box in and they set it down in the middle of the floor and it gives us a lot of bandwidth.”

This isn’t Schneider’s first debate rodeo. Over the years, he’s developed a playbook of prep for turning huge halls into one-night newsrooms. His team spent months preparing for Saturday’s event.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said, “but it is a huge logistical thing to set up”